Simpson, Louis (Vol. 4) - Simpson, Louis 1923–
Simpson, Louis 1923–
Simpson is a Jamaican-born American poet, critic, and editor. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1964. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)
[Simpson] demonstrates that the best service an American poet can do his country is to see it all: not just the promise, not just the loss and the "betrayal of the American ideal," the Whitmanian ideal—although nobody sees this last more penetratingly than Simpson does—but the whole "complex fate," the difficult and agonizing meaning of being an American, of living as an American at the time in which one chances to live. If it comes out sad, as it does with Simpson despite all his wit and compassion, it is a whole and not a deliberately partial sadness, and this gives the pervasive desperate sadness of [Selected Poems] a terrific weight of honesty and truth….
Through the used-car lots, through the suburbs, through the wars that are only...
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